horror makeup: Hellraiser

Hellraiser

The Hellraiser franchise peaked with Hellbound and has been going downhill ever since. Nut the cenobites remain one of the great ideas of the horror genre. This is Grace Kirby (Clive Barker’s cousin) as the first female cenobite a role that recured in Hellbound: Hellraiser played by Barbie Wilde. This is the only image I have found of Grace: if anyone can help with a better image, please themakeupgallery.

But the cenobites were not the only special feature of the early Hellraiser movies: a quite incredible range of talented British makeup artists worked on the first three movies in particular: the links below will indicate how some have moved on since. I was fortunate to see Image Animation applying the skinless-Frank makeup on one of their crew: you should have seen my daughter jump when the Chatterer tapped her on the shoulder.

Grace Kirby is now a teacher and wishes to keep her Cenobite past private. I know where she works – her students keep telling me, no doubt in the age-old tradition of ‘embarassing teacher’ – but I feel no obligation to publicise that information which would be an invasion of her privacy.